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My bold prediction: Facebook will be broke in five years, gone in ten. Anyone getting into bed with them now is putting the noose around their own neck. Facebo

My bold prediction: Facebook will be broke in five years, gone in ten. Anyone getting into bed with them now is putting the noose around their own neck. Facebook is a prototype of what "social networking" should be. Anyone who took five minutes out of their day could think up ten ways "social networking" could be better, and probably all of them would be incompatible with facebook's business model.

yourad_io 13y ago
IANABP (..Business Person) but their 2 big acquisitions have increased their share of the social/data/identity pie considerably. Yes, these can be very ephemeral and the market can change on you (as MySpace will gladly tell you), but having 1.1B+ monthly actives on your core platform alone (plus however much instagram+whatsapp do) gives you a lot of room to try and recover when things start shrinking. The oculus VR acquisition feels special, in that they aren't just buying users/reach, but something more substantial and forward looking. If they're smart, they'll let the oculus team work on the track they've been on, and let Facebook teams develop the "non-gaming VR experiences" they want to push. Hard to think how much the landscape would need to shift for FB to be broke in 5 years. If Oculus delivers on their VR dreams, that alone could potentially bring an almost-bankrupt FB back from the brink.
- tomelders 13y ago
  I find it's very easy to imagine how the landscape could change for FB to be broke in five years; Anyone can build a better way to "social network", and anyone will. Guaranteed. The only real question is... what happens if Facebook can't buy them? I admire what Facebook has achieved, but it's clear to me that they don't understand what their actual role is, or what people "want" from Facebook as a company if it is to survive. There is an air of mild desperations to the whole enterprise that hints at the acknowledgement of an imminent demise. This acquisition reeks of that desperation.

yourad_io 13y ago

IANABP (..Business Person) but their 2 big acquisitions have increased their share of the social/data/identity pie considerably. Yes, these can be very ephemeral and the market can change on you (as MySpace will gladly tell you), but having 1.1B+ monthly actives on your core platform alone (plus however much instagram+whatsapp do) gives you a lot of room to try and recover when things start shrinking. The oculus VR acquisition feels special, in that they aren't just buying users/reach, but something more substantial and forward looking. If they're smart, they'll let the oculus team work on the track they've been on, and let Facebook teams develop the "non-gaming VR experiences" they want to push. Hard to think how much the landscape would need to shift for FB to be broke in 5 years. If Oculus delivers on their VR dreams, that alone could potentially bring an almost-bankrupt FB back from the brink.

tomelders 13y ago
I find it's very easy to imagine how the landscape could change for FB to be broke in five years; Anyone can build a better way to "social network", and anyone will. Guaranteed. The only real question is... what happens if Facebook can't buy them? I admire what Facebook has achieved, but it's clear to me that they don't understand what their actual role is, or what people "want" from Facebook as a company if it is to survive. There is an air of mild desperations to the whole enterprise that hints at the acknowledgement of an imminent demise. This acquisition reeks of that desperation.